1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to semiconductor design and manufacturing. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for determining an optical process model that can model the effects of optical proximity correction.
2. Related Art
Rapid advances in computing technology have made it possible to perform trillions of computational operations each second on datasets that are sometimes as large as trillions of bytes. These advances can be attributed to the dramatic improvements in semiconductor design and manufacturing technologies which have made it possible to integrate tens of millions of devices onto a single chip. Optical proximity correction (OPC) techniques continue to play an important role as semiconductor design enters the deep submicron era.
Model-based OPC techniques typically use a process model to correct a design layout. The process model enables an OPC technique to ensure that the corrected mask pattern will result in a reasonable approximation of the design intent that is desired to be created on the wafer.
If a chip designer does not have accurate information about the effects of downstream processes, some manufacturing problems may not be identified until at a very late stage in the design flow. Hence, it is generally desirable to provide a chip designer with as much information as possible about the effects of downstream processes, thereby enabling the designer to solve manufacturing problems at an early stage in the design flow.